Normalization of Castration Anxiety

Castration anxiety without father-fearing

Any suppression of sexuality normally produces sexual anxiety. A domineering or abusing father, sexually restrictive moral and upbringing, are all capable of producing sexual neuroses in sensitive children. It is possible that in some fearful children the normally restrictive father figure turns out to be frustrating enough to produce the symptoms of castration anxiety. Severe sexual restriction and repression imposed on children with normal sensitivity habitually trigger sexual neuroses. Severe asexual frustrations can also destabilize the sexual sphere and result in sexual anxieties. Physical restraint of sexuality including reduction of erogenous sensitivity inevitably causes sexual frustration. In all of these cases the frustrations are adequate responds to the conditions. The neuroses that adequate frustrations may instigate have nothing to do with the Oedipus conflict. In the dogmatic frame of Freudian psychology, however, all sexual anxieties can only be associated with children’s excessive libido and irrational fears and attributed to castration complex.

Both physical suppression and psychological repression of sexuality cause sexual frustrations. Anti-sex moral, over-dominating parents, circumcision or great asexual distress can cause sexual frustration and produce the symptoms of castration anxiety. The anxieties induced in these ways are normal adaptive reactions to external reality. The same cannot be said of the acute intrinsic irrational disposition to fear emasculation.

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